Hilliard

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

Of all the styles Orlande de Lassus could write in and he was poly-stylistic before Schnittke coined the term the one he may have used least often was the severe style of conservative Catholicism. But Lassus was as supremely skilled in writing austere modal counterpoint as Palestrina and his Missa pro defunctis is as lucidly linear and as darkly luminous as Palestrina's own.

This recording represents a wide and diverse repertoire. The virtuosic singing of this male quartet will just blow you away. The vocal style has that distinctly renaissance sound to it, yet put with this modern repertoire the juxtaposition is just wonderful. As previous reviewers have mentioned there are very good liner notes, and much of the material has been written specifically for this ensemble and can be found nowhere else.

The motets of Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) are complicated works. Even casual listeners will notice that each of the three lines of music has its own text – one rapid and wordy, one moderate in speed, and one just a few words long. Musically they contain structural intricacies to which scholars devote pleasant lifetimes of research in old French libraries. Yet the interpretation of even music as arcane as this depends on the spirit of the age. Rationalists of earlier decades performed Machaut with rather harsh exactitude, seeking to clarify the subtle repetition schemes of Machaut's motets and polyphonic songs. But the Hilliard Ensemble, of the Self generation, focuses on Machaut as a creative figure with, to quote the liner notes, "a morbidly sensitive inner life."

It's been six years since these same performers got together to create one of the decade's more unusual experiments in musical alchemy. Beginning with the raw materials of early music and modern jazz, the four male voices of the Hilliard Ensemble joined with jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek to see what would happen when the proper measure of old music and new style were combined, shaped by the performers' considerable experience and collective aesthetic vision.

Fearlessly searching for new conceptions of sound and not caring where he found them, Garbarek joined hands with the classical early-music movement, improvising around the four male voices of the Hilliard Ensemble. Now here was a radical idea guaranteed to infuriate both hardcore jazz buffs and the even more pristine more-authentic-than-thou folk in early music circles. Yet this unlikely fusion works stunningly well - and even more hearteningly, went over the heads of the purists and became a hit album at a time (1994) when Gregorian chants were a hot item. Chants, early polyphonic music, and Renaissance motets by composers like Morales and Dufay form the basic material, bringing forth a cool yet moving spirituality in Garbarek's work…

Long-awaited third album from one of the most touching and magical sound combinations in music today: Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek with Britain's premier vocal group, The Hilliard Ensemble. The first album, Officium, has sold nearly 1.5 million copies, and it is still in the charts as one of the top 20 best-selling classical albums of the past decade, well after its 1994 release.